(1) SPELLING BEE. Blake Hennon has the answers in “Is it Wookie or Wookiee? The Times’ definitive ‘Star Wars’ style guide” at the Los Angeles Times.
When most people think of “Star Wars” style, Princess Leia’s side-buns hairdo and white robe or Darth Vader’s fearsome black helmet and cape probably come to mind. For copy editors, it’s more likely how to punctuate a jumble of words such as Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope or whether to spell Chewbacca’s species as Wookie or Wookiee.
With the venerable space opera about to start bringing new stories to the big screen at the planned rate of one per year — and the upcoming fleet’s worth of Times stories that will cover all the developments and details of the on- and off-screen “Star Wars” saga — The Times’ copy desk decided it would help in editing to have an organized guide to facts, names and terms that might appear in our coverage.
I volunteered to put it together, and relied on the films; Lucasfilm’s publicly available databank; the Academy Awards’ database; images of officially licensed products; and Times precedence, stories, style rules and tendencies (which sometimes override other groups’ preferences). To answer the questions above: “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope”; Wookiee.
(2) MORE STYLE. In the same spirit, but by a different creator as far as I can tell —
No spaces in lightsaber, stormtrooper or tauntaun. They're all single words. pic.twitter.com/DSLAV5DF9o
— Star Wars Stylebook (@SWStylebook) December 1, 2015
Droids, spelled phonetically: See-Threepio (C-3PO), Artoo-Detoo (R2-D2), and Beebee-Ate (BB-8). pic.twitter.com/WHTK8MvAxd
— Star Wars Stylebook (@SWStylebook) December 2, 2015
Princess Leia Organa, never Leah. pic.twitter.com/1rCFE9l59W
— Star Wars Stylebook (@SWStylebook) October 29, 2015
(3) FAN SERVICE. Mark Hamill goes undercover as a stormtrooper (one word) on Hollywood Blvd. to raise awareness for the Omaze charity that’s giving away a chance to win two tickets to the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere in exchange for a $10 donation. The contest ends in less than two days.
(4) FROM HEADCANON TO THE SCREEN. “7 fan theories so good they actually came true” at RadioTimes.
- The Doctor’s Tardis is supposed to have 6 pilots
Considering he’s a centuries-old genius and Time Lord, the Doctor always did seem to have a bit of trouble piloting his Tardis – but fans had a solution for why that could be (apart from it being an obsolete Type 40, of course).
Given the time machine’s central console was hexagonal (and all the controls therefore couldn’t be reached at any one time), could it be that the Tardis was intended for not one, but six pilots?
This fun idea circled around for a while and made some appearance Doctor Who spin-off media before it was finally embraced by the main series in 2008, with David Tennant’s Doctor enlisting all his friends to help pilot the time machine in series 4 finale Journey’s End.
(5) THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT. “It’s what’s on Mark Watney’s smartphone,” says Will R.
Through a new service (“IFTTT Blog – Houston, we have liftoff”) you can get things like a notification when the season changes on Mars.
(6) BE YOUR OWN ANT FARM. Becky Chambers remembers playing an ancient PC game: “Extended Memory: SimAnt”.
Despite the complexities, my task was clear: recruit as many followers as I could, then march into enemy territory. “Oh my god,” a distant voice in my head said. “This is a Zerg rush…with ants.” I do not know what this voice meant. As an ant, I am ignorant of such things.
(7) SUBCONTINENTAL COMICS. Henry Jenkins “In Search of Indian Comics (Part Three): I Mean, Really, Where Are They?”
So, here’s the bottom line: India has a new generation of gifted graphic storytellers, who are doing comics that speak in direct and powerful ways to the country’s politics, comics that experiment with new visual languages for comics, often drawn from the country’s rich and diverse folk traditions. These artists are slowly but surely producing work that people should be paying attention to. But, you can’t really find them in Indian bookstores when you go looking and they are not making their way into comics specialty shops in the United States. If you want to find India comics, you have to look online.
(8) KEG BUST. Andrew Porter says, “This almost (not really) makes up for HPL’s bust no longer being the World Fantasy Award….” Lovecraft Reanimator Helles Lager from Narragansett Beer.
The History: HP Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ and the 1985 film adaptation, Re-Animator, are horror fan favorites. In the story, Dr. West and his accomplice experiments with human reanimation by injecting fresh corpses with a serum meant to bring the dead back to life. We wanted to create a serum to resurrect one of our own; our beloved Bock beer.
(9) TOR PICKS 2015 BEST. “Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2015” picked by Jared Shurin, Alyx Dellamonica, Liz Bourke, Nial Alexander, Mavesh Murad, Amal El-Mohtar, Alex Brown, Caitlyn Paxson, Stefan Raets, Theresa DeLucci, and The G. (Naomi Novik’s Uprooted is prominently mentioned by several contributors.)
Liz Bourke
…I know what my two absolute favourites of the year are, though. Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory (Tor) and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy (Orbit) tie for first place in my heart. One is an adventure story in a steampunk-influenced city on the American Pacific coast in the late 19th-century, whose eponymous protagonist finds herself running headfirst into all kinds of peril—including international espionage plots—while falling in love with another young woman. The other is the capstone of a fantastic trilogy about power and personhood, and what you do with what’s done to you: it brings all its threads together, and ties them up in a conclusion that’s as perfect as it is unexpected. If you’re only going to read two novels published this year, my recommend is read them.
(10) T-SHIRT TNG. Have you been there, done that? Now own the t-shirt!
(11) HOLD MORE MEETINGS. At Open Culture,“Read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless, Kafkaesque Guide to Subverting Any Organization with ‘Purposeful Stupidity’ (1944)”
Will R. demurs, “I have no comment on whether this applies to anything currently under discussion in the world of science fiction.”
(12) OBITUARY. SF Site News reports artist Jon Arfstrom died on December 2. Arfstrom is believed to have been the last of the classic Weird Tales cover artists to be alive.
(13) GEEK PARENT MUCH? The MarySue has you covered with “Baby’s First Con: A Geek Parent Survival Guide”
Lesson 3: Prepare Line Distractions
Lines and waiting are a fact of life with cons. This is easy when you’re child-free and have access to your phone/book/daydreams/whatever. But with a baby, wait times are an event in themselves. Most parents—and hopefully that includes you—have some tricks that can be parsed out over time to try and keep the baby occupied. A good idea is to prep for the con like you would for a long road trip: have new toys/books to spring forward, and use whatever tricks you have up your sleeve. For example, our daughter is fantastic when getting hand-fed small snacks (Cheerio’s, Yums, etc.). We made sure we had an inventory of these and used them as our first go-to when she started to get impatient, albeit at about half the speed we’d normally feed them. We also got lucky in that our baby recognized some of the characters we’ve introduced her to thanks to the cosplayers, so we could point out Batman and catch her interest for a few minutes.
(14) DON’T TELL BRAD TORGERSEN. Cracked.com lists “6 Depressing Realities Of Writing Young Adult Fiction”. First up: Oh noes! You can’t tell a YA book by its cover!
#6. Covers And Titles Are Often Shameless Lies
There’s an old saying about judging a book by its cover; we’re not sure how it goes, but it doesn’t matter because titles and covers both appear to be generated completely at random. At least, in the world of Young Adult novels. Jack named his latest book The Librarian. At the publishers’ request, it became Double Agent. A little editing later, and the title was Escape From Besmar. A little more, and that was subbed out in favor of the catchier Springheel. At one point, the title was Black Sheep. Then Three Bags Full. Then Three Bombs Full. Then, at last, they settled on a title that pleased everyone: Switchblade.
The book is currently available under the title The Cut Out….
(15) XENA. Lucy Lawless on the “Xena” revival, her new show and seizing life with both hands at Women in the World.
But with the apparent revival of Xena in the wings, fans and media want to know, will she return as the legendary character she brought to life two decades ago?
…So the question of Lucy Lawless’s age, 47, is central to the Xena reboot, raising obvious retorts: Harrison Ford, 73, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 68, and Bruce Campbell, 57, are all reprising action hero roles they played in their youth without any criticism or complaints being raised about their age.
Lawless won’t go on a rant about it. She shrugs it off, half kidding: “They’ll give the Xena role to a 27-year-old.’’
It’s been 20 years since Xena: Warrior Princess was launched and became the top-rated syndicated TV program in the United States and a highly popular franchise across 108 countries. The character of Xena emerges from a dark past to defend the oppressed, fighting gods, warlords and kings, and living outside the conventional definitions of masculine and feminine. The series ended after six years, in 2001, with the brutal death of Xena, her head cut off, her body turned to ashes. Outraged fans have since cried out for a resurrection and, obliging, NBC plans to reboot Xena and has tapped Rob Tapert to re-develop it.
Problem is, Lawless knows nothing about it. She was blindsided when the news about a Xena revival leaked. A woman with The Hollywood Reporter asked her about the reboot plans, but Lawless denied it. “I thought she was misinformed,’’ she says now. “It was I who was misinformed.’’
(16) GoT TEASER? The Game of Thrones Season 6 teaser. I can confidently say I didn’t understand it. But io9 seems to. Maybe you will, also.
(17) CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME. Cards Against Humanity went offline on Black Friday and offered customers the ability to buy nothing for $5. They got nearly $72.000… most of which they spent on themselves!
11,248 people gave us $5, and 1,199 people gave us more than $5 by filling out the form more than once. One enthusiastic fan gave us $100. In the end, we made a windfall profit of $71,145.
Cards Against Humanity is known for our charitable fundraising – since 2012 we’ve raised nearly $4 million for organizations we love like Worldbuilders, the Sunlight Foundation, the EFF, DonorsChoose.org, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Chicago Design Museum. We even started a $500,000 full-ride scholarship for women getting degrees in science.
There’s been a lot of speculation about how we would spend the money from Black Friday, and we’re happy to announce that this time, we kept it all. Here’s what we bought….
(18) ROLLING STONE. Star Wars fatigue is probably setting in already, but Rolling Stone has good interviews with several major cast members (plus a few spoilers, of course) in “’Star Wars’ Strikes Back: Behind the Scenes of the Biggest Movie of the Year”.
“The world is so horrible,” says Mark Hamill, Luke’s closest earthly representative, sitting in the shadow of swaying trees in his rather pleasant Malibu yard. At 64, Hamill is older than Alec Guinness was in the first Star Wars, and is in the process of regrowing a distinctly Obi-Wan-ish beard. “Between the Middle East and gun violence and global warming and racism, it’s just horrible. And people need this. It’s therapeutic.”
The “this” in question is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, out on December 18th and directed by geek hero J.J. Abrams, fresh from rebooting the Star Trek franchise.
(19) ANCIENT SPECIAL. And if you weren’t fatigued before, well, just watch the elusive Star Wars Christmas Special from that bygone era….
(20) MUSICAL INTERLUDE. I remember hearing the song on Doctor Demento but the video is news to me: The Firm – “Star Trekkin'”
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Hampus Eckerman, Will R., Mark-kitteh, James H. Burns, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Speaking of ancient games, I remember playing some games by Lou Gnocchi. (Bit of a stretch, but we seem to be doing somewhat narrow references today.)
“Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel”
And then there’s the metaphor theory approach to “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” which maintains that meaning can be found in any grammatically correct sequence of existing words. It’s just a matter of determining a metaphoric frame of reference in which a coherent overall meaning can be assigned.
“Boring and insipid environmentalist theories have quietly been implanted in society and are energetically changing attitudes for the day when they can be implemented.”
No, it’s not at all any sort of intended meaning by the original speaker…given that the original intended meaning was meaninglessness. Rather it’s only one example of how the human brain’s search for coherent meaning can impose it on almost anything.
I love gnocchi so much that I have TWO kitchen gadgets specifically for the purpose of making gnocchi — a potato ricer and a gnocchi board. Given the size of my kitchen, that’s major commitment. I believe at least part of the magic is in the potatoes. If the potatoes are meh, you get regular dumplings. If the potatoes are terrific, you get food of the gods.
Also, I like saying “gnocchi.”
I think you can see this phenomenon at work strongly in how people respond to political rhetoric. Drop a few buzzwords into the “meaningless” sentence and people who respond to those buzzwords will often respond just as strongly as if the sentence actually had meaning. It’s almost like you would get the same effect if you just recited the buzzwords in a list, without bothering to plug them into a sentence — and maybe you would, but it would make it much more obvious what you were doing.
RE: Indian Comics. Virgin launched a comics label about 10 years ago with the intention of bringing Indian comics and creators to the west, but they fell out of the limelight very quickly. (I will admit, the only thing of theirs I bought was the Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine Dan Dare miniseries, which was awesome). The company’s still around – called Liquid Comics after a manager buyout, but I honestly can’t tell what they’ve published recently.
McJulie:
Maybe that explains this, then:
(J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone)
Of course, Harry, being new to wizardry, wouldn’t know the buzzwords…
Gnocchi: try making them with pumpkin, or better yet, taro.
My idea of a five minute meal is a bacon sandwich, which requires no specialist equipment or esoteric knowledge, just bacon, bread and butter. A fried egg sandwich is an acceptable alternative, particularly if you’ve run out of bacon, and requires just eggs, bread and butter.
I’m a total failure at being a foodie.
Quoting one of my favorite poems (by Lewis Carroll)
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Out of context, this stanza means nothing, but once you read the next part of the poem and realize this is a heroic saga, you fill in with tropes and decide this is describing an idyllic nature scene
I’m a total failure at being a foodie.
A foodie would make a bacon and egg sandwich.
Stevie: Any salt or pepper or Mrs. Dash with that?
Obviously, the best gnocchi is deep fried gnocchi.
@Mike
RE: Mrs Dash. Tried it once (my Father was on a low sodium diet). Hated the taste. The lack of salt really does make a difference and not for the better.
I’m a total failure at being a foodie.
I’ve often said that if it wasn’t for the invention of the microwave, I would have long ago starved to death.
@BrianZ – sounds like a great idea! (The pumpkin, definitely – haven’t dealt with taro except to eat it, but I can imagine that working, too)
Well, bacon doesn’t need salt, but eggs do; I’m fortunate in having low blood pressure so salt is good for me.
I’m something of a purist on bacon sandwiches; people adorn them with various ketchups and sauces, which seems to me to miss the point, but my travels on cruise ships have expanded my knowledge of bacon.
Apparently what the English call bacon is unlike any other form of bacon, which may explain why the addition of syrup to it seems perfectly normal to anyone not reared on English bacon. But the ultimate sacrilege to the bacon buttie is to stick fried eggs into it; words fail me in conveying just how wrong this is.
I’ve all the Star Wars lead up hoopla, the one I’ve enjoyed the most was a meme which extracted the clips of “it’s all real, the Jedi, the Empire, all of it” and for Rene’s response had her saying “Even the Holiday Special?” followed by Han’s face with the caption “Get out.”
One story that’s gotten some praise this year is Vandana Singh’s “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination”; and having read it, I can see why. It’s a fun one to contemplate; one of the few recently that asks readers to think about strong AI rather than taking it for granted. The premise is that this is an examination for AIs who are junior candidates for the job of “explorers in Conceptual Machine Space”. They are asked to read some stories about humans and think about what they say about the fluidity of the empathetic imagination. And then they are asked what they think about the notion of machines being capable of equally fluid imagination. Now, probably, if said machines can write these stories, the answer is yes… but there’s a question of how — each candidate is asked to “make the requisite changes to its own parts” in order to generate hypotheses on the subject. Early on, it is said that ambiguous machines “cannot exist because they violate known laws of reality.” So, we are being asked to think about how machines, unambiguous, could create stories, hypotheses, empathy — if they could.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: The “h” is back in “gnocchi”.
I can see Thursday was a bad day for the middle of the alphabet at File 770. I left an “h” out of one word, and added an “i” that didn’t belong in somebody’s name….
::tick::
@Lorcan Nagle
It reminds me of manga in the 80s. Until the critical mass hit, getting translations were rare, expensive and usually done by fans of large franchises. It wasn’t until the 90s that good translations were being reprinted in American comic form, and then translations in the traditional manga format started to appear regularly.
@Vasha
That’s the story that’s 3 linked tales? I had issues with it being disjointed; the framing mechanism didn’t really work for me. The individual tales were good, and I recall there was one that really impressed me (I’d have to check to remember which one).
@Mark: Yes, there are three stories in the middle; they are connected to each other by recurring objects and motifs (I thought they maybe went on a little longer than they should, for think pieces). The thing about this story (as a whole) is that it expects the reader to do a lot of work putting its pieces together into ideas, and doesn’t provide definite answers to the queries it raises. Whether it is successful or not depends on whether it provides sufficiently rich material to be a jumping-off point for conceptual exploration (whether of machine-space or human-mind-space).
Oh, just followed your link and read it. Very good.
If you’re expecting to spend lots of time standing in line, you’re definitely not going to the sort of convention *I* like to go to! (I almost said “the wrong sort”, but on reflection, de gustibus. If you like horrid media-cons, it’s no skin off my nose.)
Speaking of cons, though, I’d like to announce that, after the longest information hiatus in its history, it was finally revealed that the San Francisco Bay Area’s longest running SF con, Baycon, will indeed be happening in 2016! Normally memberships go on sale at the end of the previous convention. This time it took six months to even get a definite, “yes, there will be a convention.” But memberships will be on sale soon at http://www.baycon.org. And early word is that David Gerrold will be GOH.
Baycon’s been my main con for the last couple of decades, so I’m very relieved.
Things I have read recently:
B. Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer. Nice enough addition to the series: as often, I was a bit unsatisfied with the ending, feeling that not enough was explained. (This may be a result of the nature of police work, which does not aim to explain everything; it aims to find missing persons, recover stolen goods, find the guilty party, if any, with enough evidence to convict them, and so on.) Jul qvq gur Snr rkpunatr gur tvey sbe ure fvfgre nf n onol, naq gura rkpunatr gurz onpx nf grrantref? Jung jnf gur fvtavsvpnapr bs gur havpbeaf? Fvapr bar bs gurz unq nccneragyl orra nppbzcnalvat gur tvey nyy ure yvsr, jul qvq vg bayl fgneg yrnivat rivqrapr bs vgf npgvivgl erpragyl? Etc.
V.E. Schwab. A Darker Shade of Magic. Like others here I was not very impressed by it. A nice enough story, but I’m not sure why it would be one of the great successes of the year.
M.R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts (as a result of recommendations here). The start was impressive; after that I thought it fell off a bit. I think it’s significant that it grew out of a short story; it’s the initial situation which is really striking. Until the end – ow! Is he actually doing what Ender’s Game is sometimes accused of doing? I was also reminded a bit of John Wyndham.
M. Leblanc, An Arsene Lupin Omnibus. Not SF, though I found a copy, going very cheaply, on the SF shelf of my local bookshop. Apparently some stories in the corpus have fantasy elements, but none of those here. One of them is a tribute to E.A. Poe, something I totally failed to notice until Lupin pointed it out, even though it is apparent in the title. It also features Homlock Shears, making it an classic piece of fanfic. Fun, though the way Lupin can always call up infinite resources to help him makes it rather devoid of tension.
G. Wolfe, Peace (second-hand). I’ve been wanting to find this for a long time; I think it completes my reading of what are generally seen as Wolfe’s major works. It’s – well, it’s – well, um. It’s interesting, anyway. (Some people say it would pass for mainstream, but I don’t think it would; even if you don’t get the big reveal, the time-travelling is blatant enough.)
B. Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (also second-hand, I fear, or I would not have been able to read it yet). Sweet. I see why people are comparing it with The Goblin Emperor, though I don’t think it has the same depth. Possible Hugo nominee, depending what else turns up.
G. Cogman, The Invisible Library. Also sweet, and I am anxious to read more. It did seem to me to be the kind of work where the value lies in the series rather than in the individual story (a possible argument for a series Hugo); the actual story here did not have that much depth, and what makes it really interesting is the setting and the clues to a larger plot.
Now coming up, in whole or in part:
F. Hardinge, Cuckoo Song.
I. Tregillis, The Mechanical.
N. Okorafor, Lagoon.
A. Leckie, Ancillary Mercy.
A. Horowitz, Moriarty.
P. Jaaskelainen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society.
Oh, and apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s a script “leak” just posted by Bruce Campbell. https://twitter.com/GroovyBruce/status/671819681322373124 🙂
Also, equally apropos of nothing, I’d like to mention that I have set up a Facebook page for the Trantorcon in 23309 bid. I haven’t done a lot with it yet, but it’s hosting a few convention announcements here and there, and it’s definitely open to the public as well as to whatever entertaining/amusing ideas folks may have. If you’d like to show your allegiance (or opposition) to this long-running bid, feel free to stop by. https://www.facebook.com/groups/220566010571/
@Stevie:
(Or any British commenter, really)
I am almost afraid to ask, but what DO the English mean when they say “bacon”?
(Preparing to radically alter my ideas of several scenes in Terry Pratchett …)
@Andrew M:
Gene Wolfe’s Peace made my head explode.
Finished “The Shards of Heaven” [2015] I liked it and I’ll definitely read the rest of the trilogy (unless he totally screws up volume 2, which seems unlikely) but it felt like there was something missing. I suspect the historic people and places and events are more real in his head than he managed to make them in mine, if that makes sense. Not enough detail in the descriptions of sets and props, maybe. (Full disclosure: the first time I saw the movie Gladiator I fixated on the oil lamps for some reason….) There can be a problem with using a tight viewpoint of characters for whom an exotic (to the reader) environment is normal.
I’m about halfway through “Magonia” and liking it a lot.
@ Andrew M.
re: A Long Way…
As I have mentioned several times, Becky Chambers is eligible for the Campbell, as far as I have been able to determine. She had an sf short story published 2014 and then this, her debut novel.
I agree substantively with your review of the book. It’s right on the edge of Hugo level, imo. I’d love to revisit the universe she’s created. She seems to be very talented and I hope she continues to improve her craft.
One of the drawbacks of living in a Muslim country is the distressing lack of decent bacon. I don’t know if it’s possible to overdose on cured pork products but I certainly make a good attempt on my annual trip back to the UK.
British bacon is what many other people call ‘back bacon’ — having a large amount of lean meat and taken from near the spine, while what USA types call bacon is knows as ‘streaky bacon’ or ‘rashers’ and is from the belly.
@ BethZ
Is British bacon similar to what USians call Canadian bacon?
Not really. British bacon is shaped more like a rather skinny pork chop. Though Canadian bacon may be taken from a similar area of the pig but is trimmed round and has no visible fat.
Hah! My lucky 10,000 tidbit of the day is bacon in it’s many definitions. Apparently British bacon is like Canadian and American combined* meaning Canadian is almost all back/loin, American is all belly and British is the back/loin with belly still attached.
I love the internet.
* or more correctly, us colonists probably each just preserved half of our homeland food and called it bacon. ;-9
One of my friends is organizing the Comics and Popular Arts Conference, which will go on along with DragonCon next September. Their Call for Papers was just announced and since at least a few commentators here are academics, I thought maybe some folk would be interested.
And definitely not a follow-up post saying nothing since I forgot to check the box for further comments.
On SCTV’s “Great White North”, the Mackenzie brothers quite frequently referred to back bacon, eh? In one episode they discovered their viewers in the US didn’t know what back bacon was, but were familiar with a product called “Canadian bacon”. Which the brothers took to mean that in the US we called American cheese “back cheese”.
Why do I remember these kinds of things?
It seems to have come to a dead stop since then. Marvel did a mini-series called Spider-Man: India with the Indian side of the Virgin comics conglomerate in 2004, which got reprinted in the US by Marvel the following year (and the character has shown up recently in the Spider-Verse and Secret Wars events).
In Bob and Doug’s 12* Days of Christmas it’s Four Pounds of Back Bacon.
* I think they only get as far as eight.
@Jack:
“Good day, and welcome to Day Twelve.”
They got to the end, but they skipped a lot along the way.
So the Star Wars trailer looks nice enough, but it really seems to suggest that somehow there’s been a great big reset, and we’re starting all over again with Rebels vs. the Empire, to the point that not only did the big victory at Endor(?) not last, it isn’t even remembered as having happened. I know that, when this aspect has come up in the past, people have argued why such an outcome might be plausible – propaganda and memory holes and such.
But I don’t care about that. Sure if I squint from under my cynical hat, I can see the in-fiction possibility of it. But as a viewer I don’t see why we’re recapitulating old plot-lines and rendering the movies you already made me watch into nullities. If you’re telling me all that flying around and trusting the Force and redeeming the Dark Father didn’t amount to anything, fine, it’s your intellectual property. But unless you’re trying to make a point about the futility of all human striving, you’re basically training me not to care about your stories. I was thinking, this is a reboot in all but name, but it is actually worse than that. Unless the previews are giving a very misleading impression of the premise.
Here on File 770 we have managed to discuss bacon without once mentioning cats and sellotape; I think we should award ourselves some small but significant trophy recognising that this is a classy joint.
And, in a totally unrelated matter, John Scalzi’s been running his yearly showcases for lots of different people to recommend lots of different things for holiday gifts, so if you have any money it’s a great place to find new stuff to buy, and/or to see charities which you would like to support but haven’t because you haven’t come across them before.
Also, you will not be tragically disappointed by the discovery that the upper classes are not what they used to be. I think it’s a pretty poor show when deserving people like myself turn up at the crack of dawn, or thereabouts, to buy preloved 6* hotel bathrobes, only to discover that the upper classes had bought the lot on the Gala opening the night before.
Pig flavored deliciousness 🙂
It can mean nothing else.
Recent genre-relevant reviews on my blog:
Weighing Shadows, by Lisa Goldstein
Machine Learning by Nancy Kress
Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie
Skin in the Game, by Elizabeth Bear
The Machine Starts, by Greg Bear
Hello, Hello, by Seanan McGuire
First Do No Harm, by Jonathan Edelstein
Dragon in Exile, by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Well, in the interests of ruthless honesty about just how bad English food products can be, I draw your attention to the freebie things provided in our goodie bags at the Guildhall.
Once you’ve been presented with biscuits said to be
it’s difficult to think of anything other than sending in the SAS whilst praying they’ll bomb the biscuit factory, without, of course, hitting innocent people…
Baycon returns to the Escher Marriott. (Urgh — that also means it’s going to cost lots of people an extra $5/day in bridge tolls) At least we’ll be spared the weird square sinks and the truly dreadful Hyatt room art… many people swear that one of the pieces shows two people overlooking the ravine into which they have dropped a body.
Didn’t we determine “Long Way to…” was a 2014 publication according to a close reading of the Hugo rules?
@rob_matic: The horror! Not even turkey bacon to tide you over?
I once saw a comedian do this ‘cooking show’ bit where he made a tomato sauce sandwich, and tore It into tiny pieces. He claimed this was the recipe for ‘the last bite of a bacon sandwich’.
@Camestros:
“Pig flavored” is insufficient. True bacon must actually be made of pig. “Turkey bacon” is a contradiction in terms.